August 3

We tend to babble a lot. It’s as though we cannot abide silence. If we haven’t someone available with whom to carry on a conversation, we turn on the TV and watch whatever inane banality might be on the tube. We’re not discriminating. We just want voices around us to shut out our own thoughts.

Why do we feel we need to avoid contemplation? Perhaps it’s because we don’t want to focus our thoughts on anything of substance. We live in an age when everything has been dumbed-down. The foremost example of that is the fact that the exit exams for eighth graders in the 1800s were on the same level as college studies today.

We don’t study, we don’t investigate and we don’t require study or investigation of our children either. We settle for bubble gum for our brains, which explains why the United States has plummeted from the top of the list of academic excellence in the industrialized world to the bottom in two generations. Part of the explanation for this free fall lies in what we’ve done with God and His Word. We no longer
‘…study to show ourselves approved of the Lord’ (II Timothy 2:15).

In Hebrews 12:15, we are given the key to reclaiming excellence in every area of life, both spiritual and temporal. If we’ll begin to heed it again, we’ll recapture our leadership position among the nations. When we, “…watch to see that none fall back from God’s grace (then) no root of trouble will rise up to defile…” As we’ve reduced our dependence upon God and His grace, we have defiled ourselves with mediocrity and the evidence of that defilement in academia is overwhelming!